Hummingbird&nbspUnleashed

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Sometimes I think that us SEOs could be wonderful characters for a Woody Allen movie: We are stressed, nervous, paranoid, we have a tendency for sudden changes of mood...okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit, but that's how we tend to (over)react whenever Google announces something.

One thing that doesn't help is the lack of clarity coming from Google, which not only never mentions Hummingbird in any official document (for example, in the post of its 15th anniversary), but has also shied away from details of this epochal update in the "off-the-record" declarations of Amit Singhal. In fact, in some ways those statements partly contributed to the confusion.

When Google announces an update—especially one like Hummingbird—the best thing to do is to avoid trying to immediately understand what it really is based on intuition alone. It is better to wait until the dust falls to the ground, recover the original documents, examine those related to them (and any variants), take the time to see the update in action, calmly investigate, and then after all that try to find the most plausible answers.

This method is not scientific (and therefore the answers can't be defined as "surely correct"), it is philological, and when it comes to Google and its updates, I consider it a great method to use.

The original documents are the story for the press of the event during which Google announced Hummingbird, and the FAQ that Danny Sullivan published immediately after the event, which makes direct reference to what Amit Singhal said.

Related documents are the patents that probably underlie Hummingbird, and the observations that experts like Bill Slawski, Ammon Johns, Rand Fishkin, Aaron Bradley and others have derived.

This post is the result of my study of those documents and field observations.

Why did Amit Singhal mix apples with oranges?

When announcing Hummingbird, Amit Singhal said that it wasn't since Caffeine in 2010 that the Google Algorithm was updated so deeply.

The problem is that Caffeine wasn't an algorithmic change; it was an infrastructural change.

Caffeine's purpose, in fact, was to optimize the indexation of the billions of Internet documents Google crawls, presenting a richer, bigger, and fresher pool of results to the users.

Instead, Hummingbird's objective is not a newer optimization of the indexation process, but to better understand the users' intent when searching, thereby offering the most relevant results to them.

Nevertheless, we can affirm that Hummingbird is also an infrastructural update, as it governs the more than 200 elements that make up Google's algorithm.

The (maybe unconscious) association Amit Singhal created between Caffeine and Hummingbird should tell us:

That Hummingbird would not be here if Caffeine wasn't deployed in 2010, and hence it should be considered an evolution of Google Search, and not a revolution.

Moreover, that Hummingbird should be considered Google's most ambitious attempt to solve all the algorithmic issues that Caffeine caused.

Let me explain this last point.

Caffeine, quitting the so-called "Sand Box," caused the SERPs to be flooded with poor-quality results.

Google reacted by creating "patches" like Panda, Penguin, and the exact-match domain (EMD) updates, among others.

But these updates, so effective in what we define as middle- and head-tail queries, were not so effective for a type of query that—mainly because of the fast adoption of mobile search by the users—more and more people have begun to use: conversational long tail queries, or those that Amit Singhal has defined as "verbose queries."

The evolution of natural language recognition by Google, the improved ability to disambiguate entities and concepts through technology inherited from Metaweb and improved with Knowledge Graph, and the huge improvements made in the SERPs' personalized customization have given Google the theoretical and practical tools not only for solving the problem of long-tail queries, but also for giving a fresh start to the evolution of Google Search.

That is the backstory that explains what Amit Singhal told about Hummingbird, paraphrased here by Danny Sullivan:

[Hummingbird] Gave us an opportunity [...] to take synonyms and knowledge graph and other things Google has been doing to understand meaning to rethink how we can use the power of all these things to combine meaning and predict how to match your query to the document in terms of what the query is really wanting and are the connections available in the documents. and not just random coincidence that could be the case in early search engines.

How does Hummingbird work?

"To take synonyms and knowledge graph and other things..."

Google has been working with synonyms for a long time. If we look at the timeline Google itself shared in its 15th anniversary post, it has used them since 2002, even though we can also tell that disambiguation (meant as orthographic analysis of the queries) has been applied since 2001.

Reading that post and seeing the examples presented, it is clear that synonyms were already used by Google—in connection with the user intent underlying the query—in order to broaden the query and rewrite it to offer the best results to the users.

That same post, though, shows us why only using a thesaurus of synonyms or relying on the knowledge of the highly ranked queries was not enough to assure relevant SERPs (see how Vanessa points out how Google doesn't consider "dogs" pets in the query "pet adoption," but does consider "cats").

Amit Singhal, in this old patent, was also conscious that only relying on synonyms was not a perfect solution, because two words may be synonyms and may not be so depending on the context they are used (i.e.: "coche" and "automóvil" both mean "car" in Spanish, but "carro" only means "car" in Latin American Spanish, meaning "wagon" in Spain).

Therefore, in order to deliver the best results possible using semantic search, what Google needed to understand better, easier, and faster was context. Hummingbird is how Google solved that need.

That patent, then is also based on the concept of "search entities," which I described in my last post here on Moz, when talking about personalized search.

Speaking literally, words are not "things" themselves but the verbal representation of things, and search entities are how Google objectifies words into concepts. An object may have a relationship with others that may change depending on the context in which they are used together. In this sense, words are treated like people, cities, books, and all the other named entities usually related to the Knowledge Graph.

The mechanisms Google uses in identifying search entities are especially important in disambiguating the different potential meanings of a word, and thereby refining the information retrieval accordingly to a "probability score."

This technique is not so different from what the Knowledge Graph does when disambiguating, for instance, Saint Peter the Apostle from Saint Peter the Basilica or Saint Peter the city in Minnesota.

Finally, there is a third concept playing an explicit role in what could be the "Hummingbird patent:" co-occurrences.

Integrating these three elements, Google now is (in theory) able:

To better understand the intent of a query;

To broaden the pool of web documents that may answer that query;

To simplify how it delivers information, because if query A, query B, and query C substantively mean the same thing, Google doesn't need to propose three different SERPs, but just one;

To offer a better search experience, because expanding the query and better understanding the relationships between search entities (also based on direct/indirect personalization elements), Google can now offer results that have a higher probability of satisfying the needs of the user.

As a consequence, Google may present better SERPs also in terms of better ads, because in 99% of the cases, verbose queries were not presenting ads in their SERPs before Hummingbird.

90% of the queries affected, seriously?

Many SEOs have questioned the fact that Hummingbird has affected the 90% of all queries for the simple reason they didn't notice any change in traffic and rankings.

Apart from the fact that the SERPs were in constant turmoil between the end of August and the first half of September, during which time Hummingbird first saw the light (though it could just be a coincidence, quite an opportune one indeed), the typical query that Hummingbird targets is the conversational one (e.g.: "What is the best pizzeria to eat at close to Piazza del Popolo e via del Corso?"), a query that usually is not tracked by us SEOs (well, apart from Dr. Pete, maybe).

Moreover, Hummingbird is about queries, not keywords (much less long-tail ones), as was so well explained by Ammon Johns in his post "Hummingbird - The opposite of long-tail search." For that reason, tracking long-tail rankings as a metric of the impact of Hummingbird is totally wrong.

Finally, Hummingbird has not meant the extinction of all the classic ranking factors, but is instead a new framework set upon them. If a site was both authoritative and relevant for a query, it still will be ranking as well as it was before Hummingbird.

So, which sites got hit? Probably those sites that were relying just on very long tail keyword-optimized pages, but had no or very low authority. Therefore, as Rand said in his latest Whiteboard Friday, now it is far more convenient to create better linkable/shareable content, which also semantically relates to long-tail keywords, than it is to create thousands of long tail-based pages with poor or no quality or utility.

If Hummingbird is a shift to semantic SEO, does that mean that using Schema.org will make my site rank better?

One of the myths that spread very fast when Hummingbird was announced was that it is heavily using structured data as a main factor.

Although it is true that for some months now Google has stressed the importance of structured data (for example, dedicating a section to it in Google Webmaster Tools), considering Schema.org as the magic solution is not correct. It is an example of how us SEOs sometimes confuse the means with the purpose.

What we need to do is offer Google easily understandable context for the topics around which we have created a page, and structured data are helpful in this respect. By themselves, however, they are not enough. As mentioned before, if a page is not considered authoritative (thanks to external links and mentions), it most likely will not have enough strength for ranking well, especially now that long-tail queries are simplified by Hummingbird.

Is Hummingbird related to the increased presence of the Knowledge Graph and Answers Cards?

Many people came up with the idea that Hummingbird is the translation of the Knowledge Graph to the classic Google Search, and that it has a direct connection with the proliferation of the Answer Cards. This theory led to some very angry posts ranting against the "scraper" nature of Google.

This is most likely due to the fact that Hummingbird was announced alongside new features of Knowledge Graph, but there is no evident relationship between Hummingbird and Knowledge Graph.

What many have thought as being a cause (Hummingbird causing more Knowledge Graph and Answer Cards, hence being the same) is most probably a simple correlation.

Hummingbird substantially simplified verbose queries into less verbose ones, the latter of which are sometimes complemented with the constantly expanding Knowledge Graph. For that reason, we see a greater number of SERPs presenting Knowledge Graph elements and Answer Cards.

That said, the philosophy behind Hummingbird and the Knowledge Graph is the same, moving from strings to things.

Is Hummingbird strongly based on the Knowledge Base?

The Knowledge Base is potent and pervasive in how Google works, but reducing Hummingbird to just the Knowledge Base would be simplistic.

As we saw, Hummingbird relies on several elements, the Knowledge Base being one of them, especially in all queries with personalization (which should be considered a pervasive layer that affects the algorithm).

If Hummingbird was heavily relying on the Knowledge Base, without complementing it with other factors, we could fall into the issues that Amit Singhal was struggling with in the earlier patent about synonyms.

Does Hummingbird mean the end of the link graph?

No. PageRank and link-related elements of the algorithm are still alive and kicking. I would also dare to say that links are even more important now.

In fact, without the authority a good link profile grants to a site, a web page will have even more difficulty ranking now (see what I wrote just above about the fate of low-authority pages).

What is even more important now is the context in which the link is present. We already learned this with Penguin, but Hummingbird reaffirms how inbound links from topically irrelevant contexts are bad links.

That said, Google still has to improve on the link front, as Danny Sullivan said well in this tweet:

At the same time, though (again because of context and entity recognition), brand co-occurrences and co-citations assume an even more important role with Hummingbird.

Is Hummingbird related to 100% (not provided)?

The fact that Hummingbird and 100% (not provided) were rolled out at almost the same time seems to be more than just a coincidence.

If Hummingbird is more about search entities, better information retrieval, and query expansion—an update where keywords by themselves have lost part of the omnipresent value they had—then relying on keyword data alone is not enough anymore.

We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about topical optimization.

This obliges us to think about great content, and not just about "content." Things like "SEO copywriting" will end up being the same as "amazing copywriting."

For that, as SEOs, we should start understanding how search entities work, and not simply become human thesauruses of synonyms.

Increased mentions/links in the form of derivatives, co-occurrences, and co-citation in others' web sites;

Organic traffic and brand ambassadors' growth.

If you answered yes to all these questions, you don't have to do anything but keep up the good work, refine it, and be creative and engaging. You were likely already seeing your site ranking well and gaining traffic thanks to the more holistic vision of SEO you have.

If you answered no to few of them, then you have just to correct the things you're doing wrong and follow the so-called SEO best practices (and the 2013 Moz Ranking Factors are a good list of best practices).

If you sincerely answered no to many of them, then you were having problems even before Hummingbird was unleashed, and things won't get better with it if you don't radically change your mindset.

Hummingbird is not asking us to rethink SEO or to reinvent the wheel. It is simply asking us to not do crappy SEO... but that is something we should know already, shouldn't we?

Thanks for this excellent post and for bringing a lot more clarity to what the Hummingbird update is, and how people can address it.

Google does have a long history of trying to bring a better understanding of queries that people perform when they try to provide answers and results to those queries. There are a lot of papers and patents from Google that look at expanding/broadening queries, and re-writing them in ways that attempt to match the intent behind them. One of the phrases that stood out to me in some of the more recent patents and papers is "query context" and better understanding the full context of a query, not only replacing one or more terms within a query, but also attempting to make better sense of all the words that a searcher might use within their query.

Hummingbird not only reflects Google's intent to provide better answers to searchers based upon their situational and informational needs, but also Google's move to put mobile search first, a head of desktop search, which is why the focus on conversational search. that we see in Hummingbird.

There are a lot of potential changes that will face us in the future when it comes to SEO, from a deeper integration of knowledge base information into search results, to the kind of reputation scores and signals that may influence the rankings of pages, to search engine indexing based upon things like open information extraction. Hummingbird may be one of the biggest changes to Google since the search engine started, but there definitely are some really big changes to come that will challenge us.

It's likely that user data that Google has collected, and will collect in the future when it comes to things like their query log files and click log files dwarf the amount of information that they've collected about the Web itself. Search entity information about the relationships between queries and documents, clicks on search results, relationships between queries performed in query sessions, co-occurrence of words within those query sessions, anchor text used in those documents, and co-occurrence of words in search results for candidate synonyms and substitute terms are at the root of Hummingbird, rather than the fact extraction used in building knowledge bases or the information from schema and meta data markup.

But there are many other pieces being put into place that will be reflected in how Google will attempt to understand the context of queries, and how to respond to them.

Thanks Bill for your so valuable support and contribution to the post with your comment.

I sincerely think that Hummingbird - and in this sense it is as powerful as Caffeine - is setting a before and after line in Google Search.

But, as at first the consequences of Caffeine where more "aesthetic", so the apparent influence of Hummingbird in the SERPs doesn't seem so strong as they actually are.

It is clear that every change and tweak we will see from here will be all Hummingbird depending. Maybe not directly, but in the line of its philosophy for sure.

Making preview is hard, right now... but we can have glimpses if we dig with attention in things like acquisitions Google does, people it hires (and their story) and pay attention to the same trends in the technology industry (hence, in how people will eventually use those trends), then we may start envisioning possible futures.

An excellent post. After, Panda, Penguin and now Penguin. In the end Google's going to open a zoo of updates.. with product listing ADs... reduced number of organic results in SERPs. How are SEO's gonna survive...Not sure though... Is moving to paid search the only option now? :)

I'm waiting for the day that Hummingbird knows that when i say "are braided phone chargers better?" I'm not looking to see SERPS by amazon, alibaba, radio shack, ebay, etc.. trying to sell me one on the front page. One day.

What a piece on Hummingbird Gianluca. Just awesome. I hope it will clear many misconceptions around the update.

SEO was always about users, but some people took it wrong. But now after this, they have to come back to the track of their audience's intentions. That's good for SEO world as well as users.

But what was more interesting is that, just after this update, I have seen many small SEO companies have started their email campaigns to provide post Hummingbird effect solutions, just like we see after Penguin or Panda updates. I hope they will calm down now. :)

Brilliant post, Gianluca--absolutely the best analysis of Hummingbird I've seen to date, especially in terms of why some of the SERPs don't seem to have been affected much. In this sentence I think you really nailed it:

"We should stop focusing only on keyword optimization and start thinking about topical optimization."

Great post Sir! You have described briefly what actually the humming bird update is! It helped me vanishing some of the blurry misconceptions what I was presuming! We can clearly see that Google is keep trying to help to get what they are are looking for! I must say that as SEO has changed but unfortunately people too. People are still trying to follow the old rituals and target keywords and still they say that "I want the specific keyword on the very first page of Google" as @AsifDilshad already had added right up there. I don't know when they will understand that this doesn't bode well anymore! Alas :(

Truly a great post and much of this organization of thoughts theories and an application of common sense was desperately needed.

What i want to make clear though, is that knowledge graph is not the little box on the right hand side of the SERP. It's probably the biggest list of details and relationships between people places and things that has ever been created. It's ability to potentially influence the semantic understanding of queries as well as methods for detecting and preventing spam in the SERP are far reaching. It's not just a box, and how often that box appears.

The post argues that ...

Quote: "there is no evident relationship between Hummingbird and Knowledge Graph."

Except that...

Quote: "[Hummingbird] Gave us an opportunity [...] to take synonyms and knowledge graph and other things Google has been doing to understand meaning to rethink how we can use the power of all these things to combine meaning and predict how to match your query to the document in terms of what the query is really wanting and are the connections available in the documents. and not just random coincidence that could be the case in early search engines."

So Hummingbird gave them the opportunity (not to say it's already happened or that it couldn't happen in the future) to use knowledge graph data to understand the meaning of words and how to return results that have the connections and answers you're looking for.

Your position is that Knowledge Base is not a major part of the hummingbird update and provide the argument that using knowledge base alone doesn't solve the entire picture and I support that idea 100%. There is obviously a lot more to Hummingbird than just knowledge base but there is obviously more involvement of Knowledge Graph in Hummingbird than this post suggests. It outright denies that the two are not just related but are infact now connected. This is a mistake, both because the quotes suggest that they are infact related but even further I argue that Hummingbird ultimately was Google's integration of their knowledge graph data into the algorithm and that future updates will feature more and more complex uses of knowledge graph to influence the results.

When I think of the difficulty of incorporating a database like knowledge graph into the search algorithm in a way that doesn't impact speed. Simply making the connection points for the two systems to operate sounds like a massive undertaking. That is what I believe Google has done with Hummingbird.

They've build the ports within the algorithm that they will need to step up the interactions between knowledge graph and the search algorithm.

They may have even slipped a little functionality improvement in the way of semantic understanding of queries into the infrastructure update but I would guess that this is just the first of many major updates that will really flex the capabilities of knowledge graph and it's ability to measure real world things and their relationships to their online presence and the content about them.

Without the knowledge graph data... how would google who Saint Peter the Apostle was and who Saint Peter the Basilica or Saint Peter the city in Minnesota are in order to separate them in your queries about them?

When I was saying that there is no direct evidence that Hummingbird and Knowledge are the directly connected, I was meaning that KG and Hummingbird are not the same thing and that Hummingbird is not a creature based on Knowledge Graph.

KG is about named entities and it is queryless, Hummingbird is about search entities and is query dependent.

What KG (and Metaweb) gave Google was the technology for applying the semantic rules of KG also to queries' broadening, which could not have been "fixed" without the elaboration of the Search Entities concept.

Therefore, Hummingbird and KG are not the same, but share the same purpose (moving from strings to things), and surely in the future the job of Google will be merging the two.

So I look at all the effort, the buzz, the fluff, the penalties, the pandas, penguins, the caffeines, the knowledge graphs, the universals etc etc etc and I ask myself: is Google search any better than it was before? And honestly, I would say "not much".

In fact, in some sectors, it's got worse.

You know the best way I find what I'm looking for using search? By refining my search. So I try once. The results are close but not quite right. So I refine / alter my search. Closer, almost there, but I can see from the results what Google is thinking, so I refine again, and bam! got it. Whole process took less than 20 seconds.

Stop thinking for me Google and let me do the brain work. Just give me results based on clear rules.

Every now and then Google brings an update that will send fever down the spine of SEOs and IMers. What i say is what I always stand by and this is that you must always have your own strategy and forget Google. Write content and get social media participation you are sure to get traffic to your site. The write did an excellent job but i will say that the best thing we should focus on is to produce outstanding content and then get social engagement

This is a mammoth post and an excellent resource - well done Gianluca!

Also kudos for waiting until now to post this (letting the dust settle) and citing a number of posts that you've studied to help you formulate your opinions.

In your comment above, you mention our job as SEOs is to "work in the middle, to optimise the connections between strings and things" (connections I call 'signals' & 'indicators')

Your comment is key and should be read by old-school SEOs over and over until it sticks, as understanding this is 90% of the way to evolving as an SEO: from matching keyword-only query strings to connecting concepts, identities and entities (subject matter authority).

When I started reading this article, I did not take note of its author. After realizing how long this post was, I jokingly assumed that Gianluca was the author. Imagine my amusement when I found out that I was right.

Gianluca, this is a great article. Long, but great. Now that Google has increased their focus on in-depth content, we should probably all start writng more articles and comments like this.

@Gianluca I appreciate your attention for this and Thank you for the sharing such a great and helpful information about the "Hummingbird". But I am still confuse with the search query of this update as I read the article of Ammon's as you suggested in your post.

@Ammon mentioned in his post:

"when I’m on a cellphone in Denver and ask Google “Where’s a good place where I can get a pizza?”, Google can take my location from the cellphone, understand that when I say ‘place’ in the context of the words ‘where’ and ‘get’ and ‘pizza’ that place is a synonym for ‘restaurant’, and can also include ‘diner’, ‘cafe’, and a dozen other words for places to get food, and effectively process the search as clearly as if I had searched for “good pizza restaurants in Denver”."

I would like to know that this will apply for cellphone search only or does the same rule follow for the desktop search?

Awesome Post as well as this blog post commentators are giving those ideas and suggestions are solve my many questions about Hummingbird Algo. Now a days SEO become change. we must change strategy for SEO as well as Link building too. Hummingbird Algo - It is best step taken by Google to provide the Best, Exact & Quality search results to those users.

As Well As SEO People be ready For this Task ---"SEO with Hummingbird"

Really good write up and agree with the last point that SEOs shouldn't be creating crap (case in point, that spam link a user decided to leave because they felt it was an easy way to gain a link albeit nofollow'ed)- unfortunately human nature suggests the path of least resistance will always be taken by some. SEO has been a game for a lot of us since it became possible to monetise against. A quick-buck. That buck is becoming harder and harder to generate. If we all 'adhered' to the rules however, the user's SERP experience would be years ahead. Akin to a library where everything is sorted, searchable and accessible (and non-spammable). Aside from hiding organic searches (and not following through the privacy thing for paid search) I think the steps Google have taken over the last 3 to 4 years have exponentially improved our search experience and I'm certainly keen to see what Hummingbird brings in the next few years as a user and an SEO.

So I see Google are being a bit more transparent as of yesterday and actually telling webmasters what they can do to rank! If you fast forward to about the 30 minute mark in this video interview with a Google tech, he reveals what the main search engine ranking factors of ranking are within Google

Oke, interesting things happening here in the comment section. But I've got a thought to get back on topic here.

Isn't Hummingbird the name of a chapter Google is in right now rather than a specific moment in time? (which is insinuated broadly in articles, not only in this post)

If I understand correct, you are saying that Hummingbird is a framework which puts increased attention on existing mechanisms like conversational queries, personalization and Knowledge Graph. This being the case I would argue that in effect, Hummingbird as we discuss it here is rather an (somewhat forced) umbrella term for the semantic turn Google is making in this day and age.

Hummingbird is great news for us white-hat optimizers. This allows us to show clients that creating frankenstein or keyword stuffed pages are a thing of the past and user intent is the most important factor.

Ciao Gianluca, this article is amazing. Thanks!
We have also translated it into italian! You can find it here http://www.wmtools.com/news/posizionamento-motori/tutto-su-google-hummingbird . If you want we to change/modify/add anything, don't hesistate to contact me.
Thanks for sharing your expertises with us.

"The problem is that Caffeine wasn't an algorithmic change; it was an infrastructural change."

Thank you! That was the first thing that confused me about the comparison. Many people think Caffeine was an algo change, when it was in fact an infrastructural change preparing for the Everflux. But you already kind of said that. As you were.

Hummingbird is the decent update by Google. Though some times it is very hard to read number of paras i would prefer to check infographcs for same. I found one on Hummingbird too, if you still hv any doubt regarding hummingbird then you may visit this -

This was a pretty interesting article, and I agree that Google is continuing to push publishers to do amazing copywriting, not “SEO copywriting”. I also thought this line was interesting:

As a consequence, Google may present better SERPs also in terms of better ads, because in 99% of the cases, verbose queries were not presenting ads in their SERPs before Hummingbird.

That means Hummingbird’s 90% impact could simply be that they can better understand queries they didn’t before – so they can serve more ads. If so I’d expect to see more budget usage and more impressions in broad match campaigns.

It's now two years later and it seems like Hummingbird isn't talked about quite as much as the other animals. I have certainly noticed that many times the SERPS are filled with highlighted synonyms as much as exact match terms. The brilliant thing about Hummingbird is that is rewards more natural writing and helps to combat over-optimization and thin seo'd content.

I would agree, and you wonder if there have been updates to it that have been slipped out under the radar. It would seem that more and more updates from Google are going to be "silent" and this very well could be one in the future.

Sorry, I can't agree with the above comments. I think this is one of the worst, most verbose and unclear articles on seo I have ever read. It really is an example of something you'll find across a lot of the internet marketing space - endless flannel that could easily have been redacted to a few paragraphs and an attitude that people working in this area have hours, days, even weeks to waste on woolly and largely ineffective discussions and techniques. It really is a waste of life all this blather and endless dissections of techniques that are most likely of marginal utility.
The author also appears to fully believe in the idea that the web should be made for google and not the other way round, the article is positively dripping with unquestioning corporate conformity.

I used this and several other posts to put together an educational deck for our team over here. Feel free to check it out. Your thoughts were critical in helping to flesh things out :)

I'm still at the point in my career where I'm leaning on others for guidance and information in the industry, but I'm starting to turn a corner. I definitely intend to give a lot back to the community; I'm of the belief that a legal perspective is sorely lacking in some SEO and internet marketing circles so I hope to remedy some of that.

Definitely appreciate your contributions to the SEO community though and look forward to reading more!

That's a brilliant post Gianluca Fiorelli. I really enjoyed reading it and came to know what this update is all about. I am not into seo but still love to read interesting information. Hope that seo agencies can cope up with all the updates going around :).

Well this is obviously the most comprehensive response to Google's Hummingbird announcement. Fantastic recap and analysis. I really enjoyed your point about how the SEO community should react to Google's changes, announcements, and tweaks to the algorithm. This approach is usually what I'm trying to convince the client to do when they think they know how to fix something or think they know what went wrong. Search engines are too complicated to rush into judgements. Great point.

Personally I haven't seen changes related to Hummingbird at all. I believe the real affect of Hummingbird will be felt a few years down the road, and we'll look back and say, "ooohhhhhh now I get it." This seems like the necessary adjustment Google needed to make in order to improve semantic search capabilities, especially those that pair with searching via your voice.

Really appreciate the recap of the Hummingbird infrastructure change/update to the algorithm? Ha, what do we call this anyway? Awesome job, Gianluca. Oh and FRIGGIN awesome image, by the way, lol.

P.S. - Random question: I had to convince a client that Hummingbird was NOT the source of a small downgrade in traffic/organic search performance in the first week of October. I ended up tracing it back to Penguin 2.1. They got hammered by Penguin 2.0 and we were still in the process of removing links and compiling the disavow file... has anyone else seen a "double down" effect if you will of Panda/Penguin? Seems to be recovering back to what it was before Penguin 2.1 now... just wondering.

Excellent post Gianluca. What I like about your post is that it ties together many excellent resources from experts on the topic, including yourself of course.

Google is perhaps one of the most sophisticated, high-performance information system on the planet and with machine learning enhancements and its increasingly sophisticated natural language processing, it is moving search forward quickly. Unless you recall Alta Visa or Meta Crawler, it's hard to appreciate just how much, though a quick visit back to Yahoo! or Bing serves as a ready reminder.

SEO practitioners have a lot to chew on with the Hummingbird update and understand how it should guide their methods and procedures.

Google+, Search, Plus Your World (personalized search results) and Hummingbird will work together to transform the user experience in my view. Personalization seems to be woven into the Hummingbird fabric.

As roughly half of Google searches are local and 3/4 local Google searches are on mobile (for US data, according to study earlier this year by Chitika), it will be interesting to see how Hummingbird impacts local/mobile which is clearly the growth engine for Google.

I know many have trouble believing, but Google financial success is tied to simplifying the user search experience and breadth (completeness) of information coverage. No other search engine that I have used even comes close. It is probably not coincidence that Google revenue and earnings earlier this week beat analyst expectations pushing their stock past $1000/share.

I think Google derives pleasure out of announcing an update, not releasing a tremendous amount of info around it, then watching the entire SEO world squirm for the next 6+ months about what it is, how to get around it, and how many sites are affected by it, lol.

Kinda like the big brother that plays a prank on his little sister, then jumps in the bushes and waits for her to walk by so he can laugh as she falls right into his trap.

Great post. I particularly appreciate the "topical optimization" line, as this is more or less the same thing I've been sharing with people I work with, although maybe not as eloquently. Point being though, is that while everyone wants to run away from keyword data and traditional SEO strategies that have worked in prior iterations because they are under the impression that Hummingbird is some new, strange Google update to get behind, the way to build a good website largely remains the same: Provide quality content. And for SEO industry people, doing so and tracking results is easiest by focusing pages on topics rather than specifics.

"What is even more important now is the context in which the link is present. We already learned this with Penguin, but Hummingbird reaffirms how inbound links from topically irrelevant contexts are bad links."

I think the main lesson to be learned from Hummingbird is that we as SEOs and site owners MUST think and write like our customers if we want to keep pulling traffic to our site from the SERPs. People don't always search in keywords, they search the way they talk (especially with mobile's voice to search features). Hummingbird is trying to capture the true intent behind the search, which may or may not reside in a few select keywords. Our content has to reflect the actual idea or theme or point of the search query, not just fit a keyword frame.

This is one of the best posts I've read about Hummingbird. Do you think the continued shift towards queries not keywords and trying to understand/connect the searcher's intent is related to Google's goal of being the "authority?"

A "smarter" Googlebot may be something that we see at Google based upon their acquisition of Wavii, and their use of Open Information Extraction of the kind described by Oren Etzioni. Think of it as a better understanding of content while it's being crawled and indexed, like Hummingbird does for queries.

Google is still pretty bad at understanding what a searcher wants, usually forcing the searcher to use a couple of words (hence keywords). Not to mention how bad they are at returning results for the right word but wrong country! But then again maybe I'm becoming far more fussy the more I use it, and expect the search engine to read my mind. Now wouldn't that be something.

I dream of the day when I can do a search once, and not have to alter it in anyway, and for a search engine to give me exactly what I'm looking for. If Hummingbird helps me I'm glad it's here.

Congratulations Gianluca. That post clear many unknowns. Now it's time to focus on content writing as "normal text", not stuffed with keywords like "cheap insurance chicago". I see that is working now. I wrote some articles and I rank high getting rather big impact. Maybe I'm wrong but "normal content" (without keyword stuffing) gets more conversion rate than "seo optimized content". I see this change now after hummingbird is live. Does anybody noticed that or I'm the last one?:)

Keyword stuffing and using keywords in content are two very different things.

Example: My client runs an assisted living facility in Oakland and the data shows that everyone is searching for "assisted living facility in Oakland".

The URL, H1, title tag, meta description and content for one specific page on our site focuses on that phrase and the page is performing off the charts. The content is good, but not exceptional or share worthy by any means.

Since we optimized the content using just this method (about 4 months ago), our rankings and conversions have skyrocketed. They could not be found before and now they rank consistently in the top 20.

Hi Gianluca A great an in-depth post that clears many misconceptions. (This post will be visible in in-depth article section in Google SERP (Hope so)).

“If you sincerely answered no to many of them, then you were having problems even before Hummingbird was unleashed, and things won't get better with it if you don't radically change your mindset.”

Actually SEO changed so quickly in last 3 years and SEOs which are continuously updating themselves with current trends have changed their mind but the problem exists in business owners mindset. They do not have time to read or even listen to our advice. They still need to rank on 1 or 2 word keywords in 3 months or so. For them SEO is nothing more than some links from directories submission and search engine submissions. We have to start awareness campaigns for business owners. To get rid of shady work and do the legitimate Inbound marketing instead of old fashion SEO where the top SERPs is everything.

Great article and it's particularly important to note the use of synonyms. Google today is placing huge value on the diversity of wording, and while it's often getting it very wrong (in my own findings it's classing a web programmer and a web developer as the same thing when they're only closely related in reality), I'm sure it's going to keep re-evaluating its synonym based grouping.

As with everything Google related we can only wait and see. It'll either improve upon the system or scrap it entirely in favour of something new. Oh the joys of working in the SEO industry!

Gianluca, you must surely have meant linguistic, because philological is related to something else entirely. While there are similarities, philology is the study of literature and classical language. Linguistics is a more contemporary view on language in general.

There's a blogger by the name of sciguy14 who gets 200,000+ hits on his YouTube page per video. He told me via twitter that his organic traffic had grown by 50% because of hummingbird. His content is great btw!

Thanks, Gianluca! You hit the nail on the head with "topical optimization". It should be the new way to approach SEO for all agencies and marketers. Yes, words and phrases (keywords) still have a big role, however, when creating sites or content which are rich in topical information, the reach is greatly increased. Enjoyed the read and breakdown of this Google update. Cheers! - Patrick

Excellent article, Gianluca. I'd read a few about Hummingbird and some of them seemed to be saying different things, disagreeing with each other - molto confuso, I'm sure you'd say (I hope Google Translate hasn't let me down there)! But seriously, if I have any doubts about Hummingbird and need to clarify anything, I'm coming right back here. Thanks! :-)

We found the article to be well written and decided to feature it in this episode. If you woud like to provide any additional comments, you can do that directly at the bottom of the page listed above.

Since this is a Daily Podcast, we will definitely be visiting your blog from time to time to find more great articles to discuss. If you would like to leave us a comment, question or a voicemail, you can do that on the right side of the page at http://dailyblogcast.net

Again, thank you for the blog post! Without it we might have not had much to talk about! :)

You can subscribe (or let your readers they can) at http://dailyblogcast.net/itunes

Moz editors, please don't delete this comment, because it is a great example of how SEO can ruin even the best things Google is offering us, in this case co-occurences.

This is an example of why Matt Cutts yesterday at Pubcon said that co-occurrences will always be weighted and not becoming a too strong signal... because people like this commenter try to screw things up.